Magnets

DAY 160

Pansy has been careful all her life.

She often wonders if that’s the reason she turned out the way she is. If this single defining trait about herself continues to define her life. The way she holds onto things—toxic, cursed things, the way she lingers. She stumbles into memories of people she doesn’t know—strangers, really—and collects parts of their life, watches them rearrange like pieces of mismatched puzzle. She is careful about staying two steps back, always. Never walking together, never being available to lend a hand to someone who might need it.

Now, though.

Now Harry Potter’s grip sends sparks of electricity through her skin every time they breeze through his memories. He doesn’t let go while they see another version of him, fresh-faced and full of wonder as he walks through Diagon Alley with Hagrid, or when he calmly walks into the chamber of secrets to save the wizarding world, again, and again, and again, tirelessly, foolhardily. And foolhardily she lends her hands, and eventually, her lips.

Harry’s hand is at her hips when they stumble out of another memory, a bleak, depressive one, with his lips on hers. As they fall out of the gravity well of the past, she tries to tell herself to be careful. To remember who she is and who he is and that the knowledge of that is a crucial armour. To remember every other time she slept with someone and came out feeling distinctly hollower than she was before. She tries to remember. And even though it was mortifying to be the one who holds on to details, she remembers every man she’s ever been with.

She’s quite sure it has never, ever felt even close to this.

This , she thinks drunkenly, breathless despite the sudden abundance of air she’s been graced with, as Harry Potter kisses her again. And again. And again until there is no her—not really—because suddenly she isn’t a singular, lonely creature. Suddenly the loneliness doesn’t have a place to inhabit because he’s so close, so unbelievably close to her. The way she’s pressed into him, the way her breaths fog his glasses, and his moan vibrates in her skin, she feels like a conjoined being, almost.

The whirlwind swelling of her abdomen had not really gotten a chance to settle. Because as soon as they’ve dropped into the present scene, she’s backed against a wall. The flowers in the bouquet sway helplessly in her hand, almost forgotten. Her skin bristles with the memory of the sunless day—winter, 1991—and she touches his face like a drunkard. Harry’s body covers hers entirely, and his hands—they’re everywhere. 

Her mouth opens up in one small, exalted breath of surprise—at the change of temperature, at the sudden shift in pressure, the lack of light in wherever they are—before he’s onto her. He presses soft, open mouthed kisses along her neck before she reaches up to run her fingers through his hair and yanks him back to her, his scratchy moan humming on her open skin—sharp-shooting fireworks in her nerves. So responsive . Pansy shifts her leg so he draws in further, his hands finding a stretch of bare skin under her dress. He’s sensitive to her touch to her in a way she’s seen before, of course she has. When they fall down down the rabbit hole of his memories, good and bad, Pansy can jerk him back to reality as soon as she wants to. They’ve been going around long enough for him to trust her enough. He holds her hand when he steps into his memories nowadays, he lets her drag a cautionary nail scratch to will him back to her.

He’s even more responsive like this. Playing off with her moan, digging his fingers in her flesh to find places more vulnerable, prone to electricity, disastrous for her sanity. She gasps out a breath just as he bites her, teeth grazing along one of her most sensitive spots.

“Pansy,” Harry whispers, dragging her name out like a moan. “I’m… I have never felt like this.”

Like what? Comes to her mind. But she doesn’t find it in herself to be tactful and pretend to be innocent. She stares at him, in the dim, shadowy light. His pupils are blown out, but his eyes have never been brighter.

“Me, too,” she says, and she doesn’t regret it, not then. Because his face opens up in a brilliant smile and her mind reverberates the words like clinking glasses. This and never and her name on his lips like it was a confession of its own.

This , with her dress bunched up to her thighs, the naked skin alight with the feel of his jeans rubbing against it. She leans up and pecks him on the lips instead of answering, her face somehow hot with embarrassment.

He hesitates a moment. In the scarce light, she can only focus on how bright his eyes are. His cheeks are flushed in what she believes is lust, should only be lust. For a strangely charged second, she thinks that he’ll take a step back, but the alarm dissipates when he fall back in, like melting magnets. Conjoined, almost.

His hand brackets the outline of her body before moving again. Her hips, her breasts, her cheek, the surprisingly hollow dip in her throat, and in places she doesn’t have a name for. He’s touching her. The world is too warm and bright and terrific when she touches him back. Her dress bunches up from and she finds herself shifting her legs, making way for him to press himself up against her. She flattens her hand on his cheeks, just when he pulls a little back, stares at her face. Her other hand, slung carelessly over his shoulder grasps the flowers she’s holding.

“Harry, the flowers,” she’s able to gasp out when he pulls a little back to appreciate her shoulders. He hums against her skin and slips over the strap of her dress. “The flowers.”

“What?”

She gestures helplessly at the bouquet of lavender orchids as he pulls back. He’d bought them for her from the florist. “They’ll get ruined.”

“ Oh. ” He blinks before smiling in muted embarrassment. He looks back into the shadow, which is—now that she’s looking—materialising into a considerably spacious room. He swishes his hand and a glass floats in from some unknown corner of the house. It lands on top of what must be a very enormous dinner table. Now that she’s looking, consciously putting her strap back in her place, that the room is a dining room, only too empty. Desolate. 

“I must have a vase—” Harry was saying, “but I just don’t know where. Kreacher might, though…”

“Kreacher?” she says, confused. “You have a house-elf?”

She could tell that he’s fidgeting, suddenly. “He came with the house, actually. I should… I should actually let him know that I’m home. He’s less like a helping hand than a nosy grandmother. He’ll stay awake the whole night if I don’t come home, only to complain the next day.”

“Oh,” she says, as if it all made sense.

He senses her discomfort, and before she says anything, clicks his thumb. 

The magnanimous room blinks up at light. It’s a large, queerly furnished room that gives the ominous aura of a museum. With the exception of some portraits, there is almost nothing else in the room but the vicious marble dining table. Something in the room unsettles her. It takes a while for her to realise that the great, dark painting at the corner of the room is staring at her in strange contempt. The frame has an intricate golden moulding, beautiful but weary with age. Old-money, is what comes to her mind.

“You don’t have a vase?” is all she can think of asking him, the rest being bizarre. The lights reflect viciously at the desolate room. She can’t quite tell if the walls are beige or simply dusty with neglect.

“I do.” He smiles the same way he did in the memory they only just slipped from. “I just don’t know where it is.”

“You live here?” 

He nods.

“It’s—” She stares at the vastness again, remnants of generational wealth. “It’s beautiful.”

“I know.”

He’s smiling now. It’s hard to stare at him when he is so open. It makes her feel complicit in a nameless crime. “Shouldn’t you inform… Kreacher?”

“Yeah. Um… Do you want to meet him? You can meet him.”

“Well, he sounds important to you,” she smiles nervously. His face, and the stagnant air of the room makes sweat pool on the back of her neck. It’s many of his peculiarities. No one would consider introducing their house-elves as anything but a non-entity. No one she knows would consider introducing their house-elves in the first place. “I doubt he’s up for visitors, though.”

He shrugs. “It’s OK, I can introduce you to him. He doesn’t meet many people. He’ll love you. You’re the first woman I’ve brought home in a…” He coughs. “A long time.” 

She shakes her head, trying to make sense of all this. Brought home . She’s not quite sure she’ll get used to him describing impossibly complex situations in homely, surefoot words.

He takes her confusion as the reply and nods, a little too quickly. He touches her cheek reassuringly.

“You can stay here… or take a walk around the house. My room’s on the end of the stairs from—” He points to a corridor to the left of them. “There.”

She presses her lips, trying to look surer than she felt. The invitation lay thick and open, even when he traced his fingers along her elbow cupped her face and kissed her quickly. He said he’ll be back in a second, to take a look around the house if she wants to.

The kiss leaves her lightheaded, and the rest of the house surfaces to her senses in a daze. She can hear the surprised squeak of an elf, she can hear Harry’s answering chuckle. A brief pause stretches, then Kreacher joins in with his own squeaky, joyful laughter. 

Pansy takes a long, long-overdue breath. The room feels as if it’s from another setting. The sharp cut Edwardian dining table, the lacquered furnishing on the cabinets. The chandelier on the ceiling is nearly magnificent, the pearl shaped crystals on each corner of the hexagon reflects the light in a rainbow of colors, yet the room shines with a bleak, muted glow. It’s almost like one of his memories, full and stark with contradictions. With a deep breath Pansy takes a step forward into the scene, with the sound of their conversation trailing softly from behind.

She runs her fingers on the dark mahogany of the table, the chairs propped up and ready. The house reminds her of her own family manor, with its proud furnishings and the deep, imposing emerald on the wallpaper. The paintings on the corridor whisper as she walks past. Their proud faces eye her with suspicion before she flashes them a smile, the one that makes her look more like her mother. She has half a mind of introducing herself before thinking better of it. The steep stairs creak when she moves carefully, eyeing the proud Black emblem on the handrail. The door at the end of the steps creak again as she slides it open.

Harry’s room is large and empty, almost. A lone bed is placed in the middle of the room, bedsheets clean and made up. There’s a heap of books and parchments on the side of the room, strewn carelessly, the pages flutter as the windows are open. The silvery moonlight makes everything ethereal, the bed, the books, the one painting of an owl propped distinctly on the wall. It moonlight makes everything prettier, even the raw demeanor of his lonely, fast-paced life.

She’s only starting to appraise the obviously muggle painting when Harry joins her in the room. Her heart makes a similar sound as the door when latches into place, locked.

“It’s a beautiful house,” she offers, her voice coming off too high, too loose, too something she can’t even begin to name.

If Harry notices it, he acts as if it’s all normal. Wordlessly, he comes closer. She can make out the green in his eyes now. His hand trails again, the skin cool and soft when he brushes it past her forearm, elbow and shoulder. He has a calm, decidedly happy look on his face. 

“Hmm.” He reaches her face, and for a moment she thinks he’s about to kiss her again, but then he tilts his head, his other hand comes up to tilts hers. His fingers work on her earring and Pansy makes a note to not forget breathing.

“And it’s yours?” she stutters. 

“Practically,” he says gravelly, eyes trailing to her lips. “It was left to me by my godfather.”

“And he left it to you?”

He undoes her earring, nodding in answer.

Something about his gesture, undressing her—caressing her face while he strips her of her jewelry, makes her heart pace up, squeak an impromptu sentence. “You know, my… mother had dated him, Sirius.”

His hand rests on her shoulder, eyes wide with surprise. “What?”

“Yeah… when they were at school?” Why did this seem like some important information to pass on? “She—uh, they broke up, obviously. And she was so… I don’t know—I think she has refused to speak his name since then.”

He seems to be processing all this. Finally, he smiles. “Woah.”

“Yes. Quite.”

“I had no idea.”

“They weren’t together for very long.” She lets out a huff, embarrassed. “I don’t know why I—”

“I don’t think I’ll ever refuse to speak your name,” he says thoughtfully. “I like it too much.”

She stops breathing. His face is awash in a glow, even in the scarcity of the light, when he undoes another of her earrings just as softly. He ponders on her locket, before deciding to leave it on. The implication that they’re seeing each other hangs in her head as she undoes her hair. The insinuation makes her dizzy. There’s another her, suddenly, the one who’s free and reckless, who probably doesn’t care that she’ll hate herself in the morning, works on his tie, then. His shirt, then. The air bites on her skin as her dress comes off. His belt is thrown to the corner and they stumble, delirious and reckless to the bed.

She falls on the edge of the bed with Harry on his knees in front of her. He takes a moment to stare before bending down, undoing her shoes, swatting her hand away when she tries to help him.

“No, no, let me. You take care of me all the time.”

“I do nothing of the sort,” she says, blushing.

“Uh-huh.” He nods, smiling as he takes off her heels. “Sure.”

Her responding argument gets stuck in her throat as he rubs his thumb over her toes. She makes a staggering noise before allowing it. Her stockings come next. Harry runs his fingers along the soft, smooth skin before stopping at her left knee, the trail of his touch bristles like sparks.

“How did you get this?” he points at the crescent-shaped scar.

“Riding accident.” She hesitates before adding, “I was six.”

He nods, looking down at her feet. His index flits over the scar again before he says, softer, “I want to know you. Pansy, I… I think about you in the middle of conversations with other people, I think of you in my office, I think of you when you’re right in front of me.” He leans down to kiss her knees, one after another. “Like this. I’m thinking about you now like you’re someone who can’t possibly be real.”

“I’m real enough.” 

“Yes. Yes.” His fingers dance around the hem of her panties. Her chest clenches, she’s not sure if it’s his words or that look in his eyes. Hungry. Dazed as if he’s fresh out of a memory. “That’s why I want to know you better. I want to know you like you know me.” 

“You do know me.”

“But you’re so closed off. You’re always running. Running and shutting out everything.”

Pansy blinks. It’s not that she doesn’t know it, hasn’t cultured it herself. No one else had been so shamelessly attentive to her. He’s rubbing the heel of her foot, his other hand trailing to skim her upturned skin of the scar.

“Not to you.” She says, meaning it. Because she may be a fox and a viper and all those frivolous and treacherous creatures Draco used to call her, but sometimes, when Harry looks—no, stares —at her like this, she feels she wants to scratch her skin on the surface, bare her pathetic soul, read him her diary so he knows all her secrets. 

He stares at her with nostalgia and a terrible wistfulness, he both knew her and didn’t. They knew each other since they were children, it brings something other than remembrance, remarkably resilient. He looks something like a painting like this. His skin was pale and littered with scars. The taut muscle of his abdomen moves up and down, the usual tightness in his neck loosen. He’s so beautiful that her heart swells. 

“You’re beautiful,” she says.

His cheeks flush with colour before he looks down at the scar again. Harry stares at the bespoke scar, fingers trailing the lines of it. His lips trail the patch of skin from the old mark and up up up, before sloping down again, hooking his finger around her panties and sliding them down, exposing her. “All good?” he asks again.

She only nods.

Pansy feels the scar shrivel, alive almost with the heat of his breath when he leans forward and kisses it.

She resists the urge to clench her thighs, fend off access, run away. But she sits still as his hands come up to spread her legs wider, eyes on her face when he leans in deeper. He kisses her core. 

And the anticipation of it, the electricity that’s been trailing around her and around him since the last few weeks shimmer and dance. Pansy whimpers when he spreads her wider, makes space for himself as he licks her up. The nerves and the anxiety and the brunt heat of his presence, makes her head spin. She falls back on the bed as he laps at her entrance, humming at the taste—her taste. The blunt weight in her abdomen builds up before spreading all over, sharp like pinpricks. A breathy moan leaves her mouth and Harry pushes himself deeper, one hand at her hip, another coming up to squeeze her breast. The sensation of his tongue inside her breaks her down. Pansy finds herself clutching his hair and pushing herself up in greedy impatience, inching closer to her release.  she gushes out. “Oh, Harry, I’m so…”close, closer than she’s ever been. Harry complies, shamelessly licks up when her wetness drips down by her thighs. He pushes his fingers inside her and sucks on the clit. 

Pansy comes with a cry.

He crawls on top of her and she kicks off his jeans with her heels. And time skips, time leaps and swirls because nothing makes sense anymore. As he kisses her, she tastes herself on him and Pansy is pretty sure that nothing even matters anymore. Because it’s that same, damned hunger again come alive, bright and stark, hot and aching. He falls into her and she melts back to the soft, soft sheets. The rest of the clothing comes off hurriedly. Pansy melts back and Harry is a mouthful of tender inquiries. And this? Do you like this? Are you too sensitive? No? This? He dips his finger into her wetness and all the sensations of her orgasm come rushing back. Tell me what you like. I want to give you what you like.

I like it all , she gasps when he pushes further, knuckles deep in her. All of it.  

She keeps her arm over his shoulder, nails digging into his back. Marks for later. He likes that, she knows, even without asking. He makes her come again before she’s gasping and heaving, sliding her palm up and down his length to guide him inside her. I want , she gasps, I want —

And Harry gives. The first surprised, exalted breath of his, the soft grunt, the way his hairs tickle her jaw when meshes his head in the crook of her neck—she feels as if she’s storing that all away somewhere. As if, by some chance, she’s able to walk through this like her other memories. Nothing could be as bright and dazed as this. Nothing in reality would be so perfect.

It would frighten her later, this level of want. But right now, she’s coaxing him to go faster. He picks up her leg to draw over his shoulder, and she arches her back.

“Yeah, baby, that’s right.” He whispers in her ear. “So good. Perfect. It’s all so…”

Perfect.

And she soars and soars and the world is bright and light—so, so light—when his voice breaks off, stuttering out pleas. Yes , she gasps. Yes, I’m ready. Come.  

She bites on his shoulder, awash in the bliss and the softest, and the dream. His hand finds hers and she threads their fingers together. When she looks back at the moment, she’s sure she thought something close to I’m falling in love with you , but she’ll never admit to that, not even in her head.

Pansy is a curator by nature.

She’s always been very specific, exact about the way she keeps things. Even memories. Her mother had always admired that about her, the way she would keep track of every detail of a dress she liked—exempt the ones she didn’t because her world didn’t have a place for things that could never fit in. Her mother liked the way she could close her eyes and run her tongue over the rim of the wineglass and recall, precisely, without a doubt, the exact notes of the wine she’s tasting. A woman has to be exact, Cynthia Parkinson believed. A woman has to exert perfection in a world like theirs. It took her twenty years too long to understand that it could be a burden, too.

It’s a tremendous pressure boring down her spine to let herself be consumed by perfection, sterling and white. Irreproachable perfection, irrefutable memories. It was a burden to remember details no one ever cared about. The bored sighs, the slightest smirks, the way the men she’s been with would scoff and shrug and pretend to give a shit about anything except her looks and money. 

Her breaths take a while to settle. Everything is simmering around her in the glow of the full moon hanging past the window. It’s so far, but she feels she can touch it if only she tried. Curiously, she finds that she doesn’t want to, instead she inches closer to Harry and takes the cigarette he offers, the cherry red tip of it burns starkly in the shadow.

Suddenly, she notices the vase. Large and archaic, its dark color has an unnatural sheen. with the crisscrossed branches littering on the marble, the orchids seem as if they were stemming from the vase itself. 

Harry notices her staring at it, and says, “Kreacher must have sent it.”

Pansy hums. The aftereffect of her orgasm washes over her body in a glittering, electrified mess. Everything is mellower, sweeter, stickier, somehow. Everything better than it ever was.

“It’s… perfect.”

“I’ll let him know you liked it.”

This makes her giggle. “I’ll tell him myself in the morning.”

She can feel his smile stretch. “Yeah?”

“Yeah.” She taps her fingers on his chest, just above her sternum. “I’ll meet him. You know, the way you said that I was the lady you brought home after a long time? It was sweet.”

“It’s true. He’s been hounding me.”

“He was hounding you to bring girls or to sleep with them?”

He chuckles, but it sounds stunted. After a brief pause, he starts hesitantly, “Not like that. It’s just—he’s not used to living without a mistress. And Ginny has never been… particularly… interested. He’s lived here forever. He’s lived alone for a long time. I’d tried to set him at Hogwarts, with other elves, but he just gets into fights. So I… brought him here. But still he’s unhappy. He doesn’t want to go out, or talk with people. I love him. He’s just a lot to handle, I can’t always explain him to others.”

The unsaid words ring in her head. I can explain him to you.

“I felt like you’d know what to say to him. I felt like you could.”

Her heart swells.

“It’s sweet, the way you talk about him.” She reconsiders this, as his body stiffens under her. “Everything you do is sweet.”

“That a good thing?” She can hear the slant of a smile in his voice, but when she stares, his eyes have that look—the trusses up, cautious lion.

“Of course.”

He shrugs self-consciously. “Just… I’m often told that it’s not all—acceptable. I forget myself, I go too deep too hard, don’t give people personal space , and…” he trails off awkwardly. The name of the person, who perhaps had said it, rings in Pansy’s ear. Ginny Weasley, she thinks. Or the memory of her, still present and alive between them.

“It’s just…” He starts again, slightly offbeat, his words are shaky and distant, “Listen, can I tell you something bad? Something absolutely shitty about myself?”

“Yeah, sure,” she says airily, despite the sudden shift of pressure. She can listen to the sound of his heartbeat, as she nestles closer. It’s beating too fast. He’s on the precipice of something significant, she feels, something more naked and intimate than what they did not an hour ago.

“You know that feeling, when you feel that if one part of your life makes sense, is normal in any way, then the rest will fall in place?”

She nods, barely perceptible.

“I was too busy chasing that one thing that I think I—I probably messed up all others. There was love, of course there was, but it wasn’t. It wasn’t. And she… well, she maybe never saw all the dirtiness, beyond being the chosen one. She could never—guess how much of me was wasted on the prophecy. Or that she wasn’t entirely comfortable that Voldemort had lived within me. Oh, she was naive, she was an idiot like me.”

He shifts, drumming his fingers on her forearm. “But I wanted her family far more than I ever wanted her. It’s a horrible feeling about yourself, what a parasite you are. I’m not sure anymore of what I do. If I love people for what they are or what they can do for me. Is it part of Voldemort still acting out? Clinging to light like some terrible, pathetic cancer?”

Before she can intervene, he says hastily, “No, let me—finish. She wanted to move away from her family. They obviously didn’t want her to, and I didn’t want to lose the Weasleys. So…”

Pansy feels his heartbeat fluttering like a hummingbird under his ear, her skin vibrates with its beat. Arrhythmic. Messed up. She knows she should say something, but she keeps imagining him and her and all the wrong ways love could go. 

“So I demanded we stay. And yeah, we’ll lie and say it was different dreams and choices. Career. But the fact remains that I just didn’t choose her. What she gave to me was more important. I’m horrible, I was pathetic. I made her so—spiteful.”

The image of him as a boy, running from Ripper, being chased onto a tree, floats up unbidden. As he keeps talking, she sees the child, small and bespectacled with messy hair, hungry for love. So famished he’d take anything, morphe anything into anything else. “It’s not your fault,” she finds herself whispering. How could it be? 

He skims his fingers along her spine. “ Promise?”

“I promise. You’re not a parasite… Or maybe you are, but it’s natural. It’s the most humane thing there is.”

“Promise?”

“I wanted to be a mother,” Pansy says softly, still troubled by the past tense of it. “A few years back, I even… convinced Draco that it would be good, that we would be good. But—”

“You broke up?”

Pansy shakes her head. “I wanted to be better than my mother. I wanted to excel where she didn’t, give my child what I was scared of. But then I realised, it’s fucked, isn’t it? Me trying to make this a competition, still playing by her rules?” Because she was reminded, all too often, of how she should fit into the world, her edges constantly chafed and remoulded to something not quite her.

“So you broke it all off,” he says softly. 

She exhales, surprised that he understood, even though she shouldn’t be. Not really. “So I cut it all out.”

“Do you want a kid now?”

Cynthia Parkinson would consider this sort of conversation the death of a courtship. Never talk about permanence with a man you’ve just lain with. It makes them uncomfortable.

But Harry feels lighter than ever. He feels comfortable. “I… maybe? I want a kid so I’d know what it feels like to love someone more than self-preservation. More than life. I’m still learning, learning to not be selfish. But it’s so complex. Love is a hundred different things all tangled up. Fear, loss, adoration, jealousy, all of it. Love is a mutant. A shape-shifter. It’s easy to misinterpret. Most of us want love, we just go about the wrong way to get it, sometimes. I’m starting to think it’s human. It’s necessary, even. So you loved the Weasleys. You loved your family, and you acted selfishly to keep it. I’d probably have done that, too.”

“After Ginny it all felt so pointless. Even sex lost its taste. It’s all just recycled energy. I couldn’t quite get the hang of life again. That’s why I… that’s why I started going back. You know, back to the past, to see what I could’ve been. I think—I know that’s stupid—that maybe I can fix myself if I see what was wrong.” He chuckles dryly. It sounds hollow and stiff. “Is it pathetically optimistic?”

“Maybe. But it doesn’t matter, because we need to survive. Hope and stupidity, too.” And anyway, his shameless optimism is somewhat of a turn on. The post-orgasmic openness makes her admit that she wants to be around it all the time, the light. She wants to be around his chivalry, the attention, the way he sees the world. She wants to soak the goodness like a second skin.

Something in him comes alive again when she answers. She can feel him nestling closer, smelling her hair. The telltale shiver of earlier makes reappearance as their hands move again. She hums softly as he flips her. The sheet falls off from their bodies. The scar on his shoulder blinks in the moonlight, as does the mark of her teeth. “Can I say something?” he says, squeezing her breast, thumb rubbing over her nipple.

Pansy moans. “Is it sweet?”

“Absolutely greasy. Mind numbingly saccharine.”

She scrunches her nose. He already has his fingers skimming the inside of her thighs. He smirks when he finds her already wet, ready for him.

“Say it,” she pleads. He leans in and she feels his length on the inside of her thighs.

He looks at her like she’s something of a surprise. Something unexpected. “You’re just about the most perfect person I’ve ever met.”

She starts to tell him that his sense of perception is fucked, then. All heavily altered due to coitus and smoking weed.

But he’s doing that atrocious thing with his fingertips, rubbing circles, testing her spots. She gasps and his face is open, with the great and terrible longing that she feels herself melting back, and the rest of the night plays in her head like a recorded film.

He leans down so there noses touch, his eyelids flutters on her when she blinks. “Too sweet?”

She hums. 

“Something else, then.” His finger finds her center, and the barest push makes her breath out a moan. “I can’t wait to fuck you again.”

The night begins again, or ends a hundred different times. Her vision shrivels and changes, bright with colour. Like that one time her and Blaise tried one of psychedelic mushrooms the Weasley brothers sold. Everything is clear and bright, and prismatic. A hundred different colours at once. Pansy kisses him, and touches him, finds his spots, the ones that make him whimper and pull her close, whispering that it had never, ever been better than this . When she’s on top of him, moving in and out of skin, his fingers dig into her flesh hard enough to leave indents, he backside, her breasts, her hair—“ You smell good”— sending shots of adrenaline to her stomach. And she clenches, shudders when he lets out a long, aching moan and comes again, inside. The wetness slicks and slides when she leans down, kisses his bottom lip before crying out in her own, drawn out ecstasy. For a blissful second she can’t remember where they are, what day it is, or why it seemed so important to her to keep him away—to find gaps between their worlds and build forts and fortresses of arguments. Surely nothing else matters.  Pansy moans in content at the pressure of his hand on her back, her skin alight everywhere he touches her, and everywhere he doesn’t. 

After, when their hushed laughter reverberates in the lacquered walls, she wonders if anyone had ever been so happy. He whispers in her ear. Things she knew already in some deep and shadowy corner of her soul. About his godfather, the gift of prophecy, his house-elf and his life and Pansy offers her own puddle of intimacy. The night stretches on and they are tired and sleepy and she can’t keep count of how much she says. And for the first time in a long, long time, she doesn’t care to.